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Public sector spends record £10m on G-Cloud services

Procurement service breaks free of shackles accusing it of underuse with record month

Government departments and public sector bodies spent around £10m on IT software and services in October, the largest monthly spend in the G-Cloud push to date.

Total spend on the G-Cloud platform, which was launched in early 2012, has now reached £63.4m, with 56 percent of cash going to small and medium-sized IT firms, the intended beneficiaries of the G-Cloud scheme.

There were several sizeable sales during the past month, with £256,725 spent by the Office of the Public Guardian with The Engine Group on a core systems replacement, while the Ministry of Justice spent £217,456 with Detica.

The Department of Health spent £158,882 with PA Consulting on the first phase of a cloud migration project for the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

IBM also scored a number of deals with the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, with the largest worth £23,000 for a lead data analyst who worked for the department for two months.

However, the biggest deals were signed off by Plymouth University, which spent £435,000 with ONI, a Cisco Gold Partner, for a managed wireless deployment in September, although this was only revealed in the October spending document.

The Office of Fair Trading is currently carrying out a study on government and public sector IT procurement in a bid to ensure that smaller businesses aren't being locked out of the market by high barriers of entry. The investigation will also look to see whether taxpayers are getting value for money from larger businesses, which have been accused of overcharging for their services and proliferating vendor lock-in.